The Art Scene: 11.17.11

Kathy Hammond’s drawing “Solitary” from 2010 is part of the Artists Alliance of East Hampton’s fall exhibit at Ashawagh Hall in Springs this weekend.

Fall Showing of the Alliance
The Artists Alliance of East Hampton will present its fall art exhibit beginning tomorrow at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. The exhibit of work by 46 of its members will continue through Sunday.
A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.
New Art at Demato
The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will open a new show of work by Kyla Zoe Rafert on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
Ms. Rafert uses a variety of mediums to create a staged world of young women and adolescent girls caught in old-fashioned notions of history and the feminine. In a work such as “Duel” two bucks fight over a hoopskirt-clad girl in a richly patterned and artificial background and setting.
Also on view will be a several limited edition prints by Andrea Kowch.

Early Holiday Shopping
The Grenning Gallery is showing “Gems,” a collection of smaller works by gallery artists perfect for the season of gift giving.
Among the paintings is Marc Dalessio’s “Lake in Connecticut,” a mid-summer New England lake scene, and a new painting of Main Street, Sag Harbor, by James Daga Albinson.
Daniela Astone will be exhibiting “Smelly Pigs” and “White Chairs” with “Val D’Allos,” an alpine scene, by Leo Mancini-Hresko. Also on view will be works by Joe Altwer, Jimmy Sanders, Melissa Franklin Sanchez, and Stephen Bauman. There will also be more sizable works upstairs by Ramiro, Ben Fenske, and Marc Dalessio.

Ray Parker at Washburn
Ray Parker’s “Simple Paintings From the 1960s” are on view at the Washburn Gallery in New York City beginning today.
According to an essay by Klaus Kertess, an East Hampton critic and curator, Parker, who died in 1990, was among artists such as Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Jack Youngerman who “sought to create abstract paintings that filtered out the highly wrought drawing and emotional pyrotechnics of Abstract Expressionism, while retaining the scale and directness introduced by [Jackson] Pollock and his peers.”
The paintings on view feature simple ovoid or rectangular shapes in subdued tones that may be brooding but often cede very little emotional content. Their ponderous stillness offers a challenge to earlier work that featured more gestural and balletic brush work.
The show is on view through Jan. 28.

Staller Shows Nicholson
The Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University is showing Roy Nicholson’s paintings as part of a show called “Re-Natured,” which pairs Mr. Nicholson, who lives in Sag Harbor, with the artist Cui Fei.
Mr. Nicholson, who was born and raised in Britain, often takes the English-style garden as his inspiration. From this he creates forms both literal and more intuitive to populate his canvases. Time and the passage of seasons are important themes and the garden forms he paints reflect those changes, although rarely with an absence of saturated color.
The exhibit will be on view through Dec. 17.

Gail Levin to Speak
Tomorrow, Gail Levin, author of many books and most recently of “Lee Krasner: A Biography,” will speak about Krasner and the book as part of Molly Barnes’s Brown Bag Lunches at the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City. The talk begins promptly at noon.

Vered Unveils Winter Show
The Vered Gallery in East Hampton will open a winter group exhibit tomorrow with a variety of landscape and seascape paintings. Modern and traditional landscapes by artists such as Thomas Moran, Milton Avery, and Oscar Bluemner will be shown with more contemporary paintings by Wolf Kahn, Jules Olitski, Robert Dash, Balcomb Greene, and Grant Haffner. Works by Hunt Slonem, Steven Klein, Larry Rivers, Bert Stern, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso will be on view as well.
The exhibit will remain on view through Jan. 30.

Face Off at Booth
“About Face: Portraits + Personalities + Documentary” will open at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor on Saturday. The show will feature work by Burt Glinn, Barbara Macklowe, Steve McCurry, Costa Peterson, and Bert Stern.
The exhibit includes recognizable faces as well as the more anonymous among us. What attracts Ms. Booth to the portrait, according to a release, is “the seductive moment between the photographer and what the subject is willing to reveal.”
A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will remain on view through Dec. 15.